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Student Work
Title
Noroton River Ecological Improvement District
Project Description
Located in the Southwest Coast watershed of Connecticut, this project poses cross-municipal collaboration on ecological vitality based on shared ecological risk. The towns of the Southwest Coast are characterized by extreme economic inequality set in a landscape of shared coastal and inland flooding risk, as well as significant hypoxia problems in Long Island Sound. The Noroton River subregional basin is used as a case study as it runs from New Canaan south to form the border between Stamford and Darien and has relatively low water quality compared to other rivers in the Southwest Coast. The proposal attempts to approach socio-economic disparities by establishing sister-city relationships in “Ecological Improvement Districts,” which various planning mechanisms in which towns work together to improve riparian health, establish low-income housing in transit oriented development, reduce vulnerability in flood zones, improve water quality, and implement designed experiments to test ecological land-use strategies.